Epicurus and Euripides have Tea in Shrewsbury College

Father's wit takes a serious turn.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

This continues from Father's previous post I shared, Did You Ever Have Tea at Shrewsbury College?

Regularly, twice a year, some British Government minister gives certain formulaic and ritual undertakings.

Apparently there is so much violence against girls - of thirteen years or even as young as eleven - including a great deal of sexual violence from boyfriends - that the government is going to take action. What sort of action? Somehow reinforcing patterns of parental control? Ensuring that parents know how their young are dressed and where they're going and what they're doing and who they're with and what time they come home? A long and up-hill struggle to reintroduce patterns of courtship and of gradualism in the development of relationships? Seminars for the young on Modesty?

Not on your life. They will take the same action as they promised six months ago. Children aged five (or three?) and upwards are to be taught in school about the wrongness of violence against females. 

Sex and drink need ritual. They need inherited and formalised restraints. For, as Euripides taught the Athenians in their theatre, Aphrodite and Dionysus are dangerous gods. If you don't believe me, ask Hippolytus or Pentheus. When you fail to treat the divinities with respect, they take you to the cleaners. What is wrong with our society is not that the schools fail adequately to drive home the imperatives of political correctness; it is that members of the cultural elite have in the last generations prided themselves on destroying the restraints and deriding the rituals; and now the gods have descended upon them, as they did upon that Hideous Strength, and, my goodness, with what a vengeance. And those elites don't like it. And the only remedy they seem to be capable of discerning is the ancient mantra: "Doctor says keep on taking the pills". But what the Modern Girl needs is not more skill in contraception and better access to abortifacients, but careful lessons on how to entertain the Modern Boy to Tea.

And there can never have been a society which knew so little about hedone - real pleasure. I doubt if our culture of binge drinking delivers half the pleasure of wine approached with respect and drunk in accordance with archaic rituals (I know you will remember the Alec Guinness clergyman character in Kind Hearts and Coronets reminding the visiting 'bishop' that "The decanter is with you, my Lord").

And I doubt if our culture of instant polybonk delivers a tenth of the pleasure of wondering whether she really meant to brush your hand with hers as she offered you another sandwich.